This application relates to the field of electronic document and data exchanges between different entities, and specifically to systems and methods for configuring electronic documents. Electronic document standards and associated communication protocols have been developed to provide businesses and other entities with secure and reliable systems for exchanging information, conducting transactions, and automating many business processes. In this application, electronic documents or other types of data that utilize these electronic document standards and/or protocols are referred to generally as business-to-business (B2B) documents, although embodiments of the invention are not limited to business applications.
Although B2B documents provide many advantages to businesses, creating, configuring, maintaining, and modifying B2B documents is complex and error-prone. For example, there are many different B2B protocols that may be used to communicate B2B. For each protocol, a given B2B document may have many different parameters. Furthermore, these B2B document parameters may have different valid values and/or need to be processed by B2B applications differently.
Because of this complexity, many prior B2B applications use hard-coded configurations of B2B document parameters and only allow internal administrators to access and/or modify B2B document parameters. B2B document parameter configurations are not open to outside business partners or end-users, so any changes to B2B document parameters in prior B2B applications require engineering and/or system administrator support. This greatly increases the time and expense required to create and modify B2B documents.